An accounting system typically manages one or more source documents. A source document is an original record that evidences an occurrence of one or more business events in an accounting system. Source documents are entered into an accounting system that records, classifies, tracks, and reports on the economic resources exchanged or committed at a time of a business event (e.g., entry of a purchase order). There are multiple operations and administration activities that process these source documents to generate downstream register and journal entries as well as additional downstream source documents. Register and journal entries as well as downstream source documents need to reference the source documents from which they were originated.
An accounting system needs to control processing of different types of source documents. However, some types of source documents and associated processing requirements are unknown when an accounting system is developed. As new types of source documents are defined for new source document implementations, various business processes and entity types need to reference and process these new source document types. This can be difficult when the source document type was not defined at the time the business process or entity was developed. One potential solution is to create custom source documents and to create custom business processes for processing these source documents. This solution typically needs significant software development time, and usually needs the use of overlapping database foreign keys that can lead to referential integrity problems in relational database applications, both of which are undesirable features for many use scenarios. It is with respect to these and other considerations that improvements are needed to improve management of source documents and source document processing for accounting systems.